


Take Your Devil by the Throat

by SimplexityJane



Category: Jessica Jones (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 12:47:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6195691
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SimplexityJane/pseuds/SimplexityJane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Those red pills change Trish into something that might be worse than a deal with the devil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take Your Devil by the Throat

Here’s the thing:

Your mother doesn’t have to sell your soul to the devil to be a monster. Your best friend doesn’t have to go to school with a superhero to know that she can save people. You don’t have to go through Hell to go through hell. And you don’t have to put on a costume to save people.

These are all things that Trish knows, but buried underneath them is another, surer knowledge that something has always been coming for her, chasing her like a shadow, even when Jessica was Before-Jessica, even when she was going to go for the whole superhero thing because even though she’d promised once upon a time, the first person she’d saved _hadn’t even wanted her to_. It itches like addiction, like pills, but farther away and deeper in her skin. Like the stories she heard, through backchannels and blogs and contacts at the Rising Tide before it disintegrated, of people who _changed_ , but who’d always been something more, or maybe just different, than human.

And those little red pills had burned through her body, and she’d almost died, and she’d walked up to Kilgrave still weak from it (maybe, maybe not weak at all, hands bloodied because part of her already wanted to kill, part of her wanted to rage at the whole world so they could see what she could do), and he’d told her to kiss him, told her to go away with him.

_Flashes_ , Hope had said, and Jessica had stumbled over the words too, when she was actually drunk enough for it to _count_. Two people, probably both special, and they'd only had flashes of themselves.

This isn’t a flash. This isn’t Trish remembering twenty-four hours later that she did something horrific, that she was pushed out of her own brain. This isn’t even Jessica telling her there’s a bullet in her head, that she did what he said, a _lucky_ twist because he hadn’t told her to kill herself. This is red rage because no one was supposed to be able to touch her except for when _she_ wanted them to, and brain-and-hands, _they_ touched her. Her mother and Kilgrave and Will, and _no!_

She is _conscious_.

She shouldn’t be. Everything – _everything!_ – that she’s been through, that survivors talk about after being Kilgrave-d (like that’s a  _verb_ , like that’s something that just  _happens_ to people), tells her that she shouldn’t be this aware this soon, that she should just be standing in the background, a little _Patsy_ to lure Jessica Jones in close enough to get caught up in his trap. If she could get control of one hand, she’d have her whole body. One finger, a twitch, spine to brain to spine to finger to  _bladed-hand_ on his trachea, then bash his head on the ground until he’s dead for good.

She’s planned out Kilgrave’s murder in her head since the night she got Jessica back. Now if only she could _do it_ , squirm free of this bastard’s voice in her head.

Jessica turns to her and shocks her with those words right when her pinky starts twitching, and she doesn’t have to.

The next few days are a blur of interviews and mutters and severely damaging her hand on her own wall when the rage flares back up with the thrilling song, telling her not to do _that_ , but she’s had enough of people controlling her life to let chemicals that are somehow stuck in her _head_ tell her what to do, which is to slam other people into the ground until they're dead.

She bandages her knuckles and pretends her fingers don’t burn, aren't broken (what can anyone do about broken _fingers_ anyway?), and she talks and she talks and she _talks_ , until she wants to scream at somebody that something broke inside her. She sees lights around people now, and she sees even more shadows, lingerers, victims who needed justice that they are never going to get, because even death isn’t enough for _that_ monster.

The radio show keeps going on, more popular than ever. Trish _almost_ refuses to talk about Jessica, or Kilgrave, or anything related to superheroes, but too many people connected the dots after the Incident that she can't avoid it.

She does not say that she knew Kilgrave existed. She does not say that she _warned you, dammit_ , she does not let the simmer of rage that sits under her skin as a constant companion now lash out at innocent people. Instead, she turns their words on themselves, talks about abuse of power and cycles of abuse, how someone who raped, tortured, and murdered so many people was _created_ , but that other people were created too, came out of the same monstrous circumstances that he went through but _refused_ to become monsters themselves.

She doesn’t talk about herself, how things move sometimes, are just there when she needs them. Coffee creamer right in her reach, the last yogurt in the back of her refrigerator coming easily into her fingers, _tiny_ things. She doesn't tell anyone that she knows why normal human beings can knock Jessica flat on her back if she’s not looking (it’s her stance, a deliberate tightness that comes from _containing_ enough power to stop a moving car and puts her off-balance).

Her trainer says she’ll need to inform any would-be muggers that her body is a lethal weapon now, because there are laws about that, and self-defense gets complicated when you’re a human _and_ a weapon. Trish almost laughs when he says that.

If it weren’t for the files, Trish would think she’s going insane.

She’s not one of them, the people who come out of stone, something written in their genetic code from a _long_ time ago. She’s something else entirely, inhuman in another, stranger way. She sleeps less, not because of insomnia or even because of the dreams, which are filled with fire and visions of another Jessica, another world where something else separated her from a different Kilgrave. She dreams about dying. A husband. Clawing her way out of Hell by her fingernails if she has to. But she only dreams for four hours through the night, awake and all-too-alert after that.

She doesn’t ask her mother about _him_. The man in her dreams, with her nose and her chin and her way of holding it when she’s pissed. The man who made her, her father, the devil who might not be the Devil here but isn’t _right_. She doesn’t ask what her mother was like before he came into her life, if she manipulated him or if he turned her into the thing that’s clawing at her all the time.

She knows that life just isn’t that simple. She unwraps her hand a week after her fingers have healed and hides the hell that’s behind her eyes. There’s a Daredevil in Hell’s Kitchen, and she follows his streak to a young man, and she asks him if he’ll help her help people too.

He looks at her and he doesn’t ask any questions after she explains what she's trying to do, what she wants to do for other people. She’s not threatening him, and she can help people like the Daredevil helped him, and the first time she puts on the cowl (she doesn’t want Jessica to laugh at her, but she still has a _life_ ), her vision is clear.

“What _are_ you?” the first one asks, and she snarls, incapacitating him with zip ties and a nice concussion a hospital can deal with. The kid – god, she can’t be more than _twelve_ ( _you were younger and it wasn’t a stranger_ , she thinks) – is shaking like a leaf, holding up her shirt against the wind. There are going to be bruises on her arms. Trish kneels down so the kid can see that she has eyes through the black barrier and isn't just a yellow and black blur.

“Are you okay?” she asks. The girl nods, breathing hard. Even in the dark, Trish can see the tears still running. “He can’t hurt you anymore. I swear. The cops are on their way already.” She turns to stand and maybe kick the shithole one more time, but the girl grabs her arm. She looks down at her, and hopes her frown shows through the mask.

“Who are you? The cops’ll ask.”

There are clawed gashes on the guy on the ground, and her staff caused a lot of damage. Plus that concussion, and a bad one at that. No one can know that Trish Walker did this.

She thinks about what the other world calls her.

“I’m Hellcat. I have to go now, okay?”

The kid nods, probably hearing the same sirens Trish does. She doesn’t smile, and Trish knows that look. It’s the same look she still sees in the mirror every time she looks at her completely healed neck. She wants to stay here until she knows this stranger, this little girl, is safe. 

Instead, Hellcat runs into the night, careful to keep to her side of New York. The Daredevil might not be territorial, but she is, and right now she’s in the mood to let the red lights at the edges of her vision blur into a world of fire and darkness if someone tries anything with her.

You don’t have to die to go through hell. It’s left enough scars on Trish’s body and soul for her to know that. But you don’t have to stay there, either, she says on the talk show, and Kilgrave _chose_ to stay there, to make other people go through hell too, a story that doesn't have a happy ending, because he could have been a better man. He could have chosen a different path.

_You can choose a_ different _path_. _We all can._

She says the words, and she hopes they're true.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is inspired by Laura Marling's "Devil's Spoke."
> 
> This was just a little something I wrote after I read about Trish's origin story in the Marvel universe, which is one hell of a ride. And to be honest, if they're going to do something with those red pills, I want Hellcat.
> 
> The costume I envision is a much less sexual version of the original Hellcat suit, with a longer black cowl along the shoulders and chest, bulletproof at least on the chest and trunk of her body. The belt isn't tied in a knot, though. That would be impractical.


End file.
